Monday, September 21, 2009

Here's a transcript offered by John Nichols on his Nation Magazine "Beat" blog, in a post that applauds Leno and Moore for a bit of what Cornell West (by way of Socrates) likes to call the fearless speech of "paideia":

LENO: Now is reform possible? Is reform possible?

MOORE: Well, I, I don't, you know, a hundred years ago when there was child labor, they said, you know, 'Can we reform child labor? Can we just regulate it, like if the factories were safer and the kids go to school, we can still have 12-year-olds working in the factory, right?

LENO: Right.

MOORE: No, not right. It's wrong. Some things are just wrong. And this capitalist economic system that we have, it might have been right at one point, it's not right now. And I don't think we're ever gonna put the genie back in the bottle. So we need to come up with something new to replace it. And I'm not talking about... This isn't a debate between capitalism versus socialism.

LENO: Right.

MOORE: I'm actually suggesting go back to our roots of this country, democracy. What if we had an economy that you and I had a say in? Right now, we all don't have much of a say in this economy. What if we applied our democratic principles and said, 'We, the people, have a right to determine how this economy is run.' I think we'd be in much better shape than what we're going through right now.

"During arguments in a campaign-finance case, the court's majority conservatives seemed persuaded that corporations have broad First Amendment rights and that recent precedents upholding limits on corporate political spending should be overruled.

SONIA SOTOMAYOR

But Justice Sotomayor [in her very first appearance on the Court] suggested the majority might have it all wrong -- and that instead the court should reconsider the 19th century rulings that first afforded corporations the same rights flesh-and-blood people have.

Judges "created corporations as persons, gave birth to corporations as persons," she said. "There could be an argument made that that was the court's error to start with...[imbuing] a creature of state law with human characteristics.""

Important and connected points, neither of which one would be well-advised to hold their breath over the witness of meaningful action upon.

The utopian dreams of globalization have been exposed as a sham...The absurd idea that the marketplace alone should determine economic and political constructs caused the crisis...It left the world’s poor worse off and the United States with the largest deficits in human history. Globalization has become an excuse to ignore the mess. It has left a mediocre elite desperately trying to save a system that cannot be saved and, more important, trying to save itself. “Speculation,” then-President Jacques Chirac of France once warned, “is the AIDS of our economies.” We have reached the terminal stage."

Quoting labor organizer Larry Holmes, Hedges continues,

"The economic crisis is a structural crisis. The recovery is only a recovery for Wall Street. It can’t be sustained, and Obama will be blamed for it. He is doing everything Wall Street demands. But this will be a dead end."

Bummer. And man, but it carries a plausibility that's hard to see the fallacies of. I don't see them.